ABOUT MY BOOKS
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RELIGION, POLITICS AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT:
POST-9/11 POWERS AND AMERICAN EMPIRE
By Mark Lewis Taylor
Mark Lewis Taylor is the most prophetic theologian, political activist and cultural critic of his generation. There is simply no one on the scene like him. Don't miss this book!" Cornel West, Princeton University.
"A compelling, timely,
and thought-provoking book. Mark Lewis Taylor's critique of American
imperialism is searing, and his vision of radical liberalism is
creative, insightful, and inspiring. Essential reading for all committed
to the revolutionary spirit of democratic governance and ongoing
emancipation."Sharon D. Welch. Professor of Religious Studies,University of Missouri-Columbia. Author of After Empire:The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace.
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| Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire
(Fortress Press, 2005) argues that 9/11 is best interpreted as a
“mythic moment” that temporarily ruptured the great myths of American
Greatness by which many U.S. residents live. It explains how, amid that
rupture, residents’ fear and reactive patriotism enabled the resurgence,
in culture and politics, of two powerful currents that long have run
deep in U.S. political history and cultural psychology: American
political romanticism and economic liberalism, which have often produced
and reinforced U.S. imperial dreaming and adventuring abroad, and
systemic patterns of exclusion and repression at home. That dreaming and
adventuring is especially prevalent now in the post-9/11 USA, as many
celebrate or debate the virtues of “American empire.” Internal to the
U.S. we are seeing the rise of an imperial triumvirate of neocons
(neoconservatives), theocons (theocratic conservatives), and CEOcons
(conservative leaders of the transnational global class).
This book is
also about hope. There are still available to U.S. residents’ powerful
traditions that carry what I call “prophetic spirit.” This is a
tradition of spirit for all public life to which no religion has primary
claim, and which those with secular commitments also help to create and
sustain. “Prophetic spirit,” as I develop it in this book, might offer
to U.S. residents a new appreciation of their land, its radically
diverse peoples, a new sense of revolutionary subjectivity and national
project, without falling prey to the romanticisms, nationalisms and
racisms that still bedevil our polities today.
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THE EXECUTED GOD:
THE WAY OF THE CROSS IN LOCKDOWN AMERICA
By Mark Lewis Taylor
"A powerful critique of America as Empire and the challenge it poses for all who believe in the way of Jesus." James H. Cone, Union Theological Seminary
“Mark Taylor’s absorbing examination of our shameful execution obsession is without a doubt the finest and most discerning theological analysis of the death penalty now available . There is no doubt that the question is once again back in the public eye, and his graphic and penetrating book will surely help focus the discussion we all need.” Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School
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| The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America
(Fortress Press, 2001), argues that remembering Jesus of Nazareth,
victim of an imperial execution, and enacting what I term his “way of
the cross” is an important resource for mobilizing effective resistance
to lockdown America – its death penalty, burgeoning prison-industrial
complex and systemic police brutality.
In my
Christological approach, Jesus of Nazareth is not understood as in
himself some executed God, as readers might first think from this book’s
title. No, the “God” who is executed, suffering imperial,
state-sanctioned crucifixion, is presented as a whole life force, a
greater power of being and action. This way of being and action is what I
summarize as “Jesus’ “way of the cross.” This way of the cross has
three crucial aspects: (1) being politically adversarial to
religiously backed systems of imperial power as they work both in
socio-political systems and in collective psychologies; (2) performing creative and dramatic modes of resistance to imperial power, primarily through non-violent direct action and aesthetic modes of protest and prophetic witness, and (3) organizing movements that can continue resistance and flourish even after imperial executioners exact their worst.
The reinterpretation
of Christian faith that I offer in this book for responding to the
crises posed by lockdown America is not to suggest that I believe
Christianity and it alone is the only or best faith tradition to fuse
with activism today. Quite to the contrary, the spiritual practices most
demanded by today’s political crises must be interfaith ones. In fact, I
believe that this interfaith dimension of political resistance today is
already at work. People of struggle, informed by a wide array of faith
traditions (Muslim, Jewish, engaged Buddhist, Yoruba, and several
spiritual traditions of Caribbean cultures, as well as Christian ones)
are all enlivening the current struggle in the U.S. If this book gave
nearly exclusive attention to reinterpreting Jesus, his way of the
cross, and resources of Christianity, it is because I am seeking to move
my own tradition into a closer and more effective solidarity with those
forces of an inter-religious spirituality that are working for justice
today.
Lockdown America,
with its circulating webs of white racist and patriarchal power, its
brutal political economy of prison networks, as well as its imperial,
networking power abroad, will lead many people to despair and
resignation. Champions of domestic Realpolitik will insist that
the police are too many, too strong, and too well equipped for people to
challenge. The white racism will seem too thoroughly woven into the
warp and woof of the U.S. cultural fabric. The prisons will seem too
massive and so thoroughly intertwined with U.S. cultural life that it
will seem ludicrous to even think to challenge them. Criminals and
murderers will always be scary, and politicians will feed the fear of
them and any new terrorist coming onto the horizon. Thus, it will be
tempting to keep resigning ourselves to the inevitability of the
system’s executioners.
The way of the
executed God, however, allows the executioner neither the last word nor
the final act. The way of the executed God, the way of the cross through
lockdown America, is still under way, still making a way. Whether in
the mother of the slain son, Anthony Baez, rising another day to speak
at the next meeting and rally against police brutality, whether in
Yoruba priestesses pouring libations to remember the deaths of their
youth of color slain at urban crossroads in the United States, whether
in the courage of a few protesting pastors who kneel to pray in front of
traffic on Wall Street, whether in a Mumia Abu-Jamal who
pens number 501 of his treatises from an 8 ½ x 10 ft. death row cell –
in all these, the finality of the state’s executing ways is challenged.
Those who pray, worship and act in the way of the executed God know that
the days of exploitative imperial power are numbered. At best, today’s
empire is an interim state; it is not final. It is only a frail
challenger to the greater, deeper, and wider way of the executed God.
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RECONSTRUCTING CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY:
A LIBERATING PEDAGOGY
Edited by Rebecca S. Chopp and Mark Lewis Taylor
In Reconstructing Christian Theology,
Rebecca Chopp and Mark Lewis Taylor have brought together a collection
of essays from a formidable cast of theologians. As part of a Workgroup
that met together regularly to reshape and construct a new theology for
the new millennium, Chopp and Taylor served to focus the group together
in this text that, while it embraces a diversity of voices, theological
traditions and methodologies, nonetheless serves as a solid foundation
for students and other interested readers to reconstruct theology along
new lines.-Fr. Kurt Messick, Bloomington, IN
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| Reconstructing Christian Theology
(1994), co-edited with Rebecca S. Chopp (then Professor of Theology at
Emory University, now President of Colgate University), was the fruit of
years of discussion and scholarly papers produced by the Workgroup on
Constructive Theology. The volume explores theology – language and
knowledge about God – as it found itself on new terrain at the end of
the 20 th century. Theology of this period worked with a new sense of
its historical and cultural specificity – its contextuality.
Intrinsic to this
sense of context was a sense of crisis. As we wrote in our
introduction, “Contemporary students of theology face a world in crisis.
Relations between peoples in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are
disastrously structured. While only 18 percent of the world’s population
lives in the region that combines North America, Northern Europe, and
Japan, that region pulls in 82 percent of the world’s income and has a
per capita income twenty-six times greater than the entire rest of the
world. The growing gap between rich and poor internationally has been
sharply replicated within the United States . . . The team of
theologians represented here, having worked collectively over the past
several years . . . is committed to careful analyses of these and other
crises. If by nothing else, analysis is prompted by the fact that
oppressing crises are not simply top-down phenomena. To be sure, there are
oppressing agents who can be identified and dominator groups and elites
to be named; but as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault insist,
oppression reaches crisis proportions because of forces that pervade the
totality of political interaction, social patterning, and everyday
personal struggle and living.”
Although the
essays in our book were rooted in this context of crisis and suffering,
the theologians in it also view their analyses as a way toward hope and
historical transformation. Hope springs from the voices and struggle of
those belittled and oppressed who now speak; hope wells up in
communities for whom new ways of living together are hallmarks of
Christian praxis. Theologians craft expressions of hope in Christian
symbols that envision personal and social transformation. This hope, in
Cornel West’s terms, is a “utopian realism”: an anticipation of a new,
transfigured reality based on a realistic analysis of the sufferings and
desires of the present age.
The author’s who
examine many of the crises of turn-of-the-21 st-century exhibit some
dramatic new shifts of emphasis: thinking not in terms of melting pots
but of collages of identity, facing crises of survival and loss of
flourishing, identifying ambiguities of postmodern culture, developing a
postcolonial sensibility, and embracing the interplay of world
religions.
What is most
important to me about this text, still, is that it introduces a mode of
theological interpretation that continually exhibits the mutually
interplaying dynamics of analysis, reconstruction, and envisioned
emancipatory praxis. In doing this, we the editors of the volume hoped
to move ourselves and our readers into an emancipatory discourse that
features not simply one more theological set of constructions but also a
distinctive discourse for making some small difference in a time
suspended between crises and hope.
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REMEMBERING ESPERANZA: A CULTURAL POLITICAL THEOLOGY
FOR NORTH AMERICAN PRAXIS
By Mark Lewis Taylor
Wonderfully provocative in both content and method, Remembering Esperanza is
a ‘must-read” for all those who face the contradictory challenges of
making faith claims in a postmodern pluralistic context. . .Bonnie Miller-McLemore,Vanderbilt Divinity School
"This is a most
welcome book. It is dense and complex, and deserves to be read slowly
and reflectively as its contents work upon the reader ... Charles M. Wood, Perkins School of Theology
“A
profound and serious attempt at constructing a liberation theology in
the U.S. As such, it is an important book for all of us in South
America: a sign of hope in the North-South theological dialogue.. .The
final chapter, "Christus Mater," represents a true revolution in Christology. Pablo Richard, Departmento Ecuménico d e Investigaciónes, Costa Rica
“Mark
Taylor has done what no other man has yet attempted (to my knowledge): a
theology that begins with his own context as a white, straight,
relatively affluent male, to address issues of sexism, classism,
heterosexism and racism . . .”Sallie McFague, Vanderbilt Divinity School
“We are all in debt to Mark Taylor’s original study of the importance of social location for theological method. Remembering Esperanza is a work that demands and will receive critical response across the entire theological spectrum. David Tracy, The University of Chicago
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| In U.S. Christian
churches, what theologians call “the event of grace” is usually viewed
as occurring first and primarily between individual believers and God.
Social and political action is then seen as an outworking of this grace
as something already received by the believer. Remembering Esperanza
presumes and argues otherwise, that the event of grace occurs,
primarily, when believers find themselves collectively given to
socio-historical movements of liberation, to what I term, in the book,
“reconciliatory emancipation,” i.e. building new structured freedom in
common struggle and hope amid forces of gender injustice, racism,
heterosexism, and economic exploitation. These movements are sites not
only for moral practice but also for encountering grace.
This book was an
attempt to trace one of the lifelines of my theological work. It began
with some of my earliest memories as a five-year-old boy in a Zapotec
village in southern Mexico, where I first encountered a friend in my
childhood, Esperanza, and her larger world. The book moves from those
memories into proposals for theological method, which in 1990, was awash
in the turbulent currents of postmodern, poststructuralist and
postcolonial society.
The argument at
the heart of the book was that North American social and institutional
practices featured a thoroughgoing, albeit often well disguised,
“abstraction” from material conditions, an abstraction that wreaks abuse
and oppression on humanity and on nature; an abstraction that is a
turning away from, often an abhorrence and fear of, concrete existence.
The fault is not abstract thinking; rather, it is thinking and practice
turned away from the sources of human and natural life: matter, bodies,
mothers, darkness.
What made the
book so complex was that this central argument was situated within a
larger argument that suffused the entire volume. This more pervasive
argument holds that any position should attempt to show how it is
entangled in particular social locations and intellectual biases.
Accordingly, I had to acknowledge the way my own social location and
biases structured my arguments, without suggesting that my arguments
were only due to that limited perspective. To this day, I believe
that even the claims we advance with the utmost of theological or moral
conviction, must be qualified by acknowledgment of our own limited
perspective and by rigorous analysis using the best that human and
natural science can provide. Our understanding must be both self-understanding, and intersubjectively-tested understanding of culture and nature, of world.
I am aware that the major christological move in Remembering Esperanza will continue to trouble even many politically radical Christians. That move involved situating God’s revelation in history not
primarily in the individual figure, Jesus of Nazareth, but instead in
what I argue is the more concrete, socially constructed figuring of him
(in social and political imaginaries), which catalyzed transformative
movements of women and men gathering in his name. God was not in history
as the man, Jesus, but as Jesus, the man become movement. I further
developed this Christological approach in The Executed God (March
2001), in relation to the powerful currents in the 1990s of U.S.
empire-building abroad and booming prison construction and paramilitary
police violence and surveillance at home. The God of Jesus Christ is
known in the social movements of resistance, performative joy, and hope
that takes on the most oppressive structures of our time.
This kind of
Christology is no mere “liberal” throwback to some nineteenth century
progressive, bourgeois theology, as some “radical orthodox,”
“Neoorthodox,” and even liberation theologians have claimed. It is,
rather, a necessary Christological revision in service to the radical
politics of Christian witness to God’s grace today. If we do not embrace
a radically socialized and politicized view of the Christ-event itself,
of Jesus’ person and work as movement of liberation, Christianity will
not sustain a radicalized social and political witness in these times of
crisis. Without such a revisioning, Christians will find it difficult
if not impossible to find their places within what Hardt and Negri have
called” the multitude,” that group of diverse humanity struggling
socially and politically, and with nature, against global war and for
radical democracy in this age of empire.
Alas, as I
pointed out in the 2005 Preface to the book’s re-issuing by Fortress
Press, “most indicators are that U.S. Christianity generally has lost
its radical vision and has become little more than that “Christendom”
that the powerful of every era prefer. The Jesus executed by a terrorist
state power, who welcomed children, slaves, the sick, women as well as
men, the poor, as well as some of the rich, and who transgressed so many
official boundaries with a radically inclusive love – that Jesus has
been laid aside by too many of our U.S. churches. I am therefore less
sanguine that I was when writing Remembering Esperanza that Christians are present as key catalysts for change today. W. E. B. Du Bois’s caustic indictment of the church in The Christian Century, seems likely to stand:
[The
church] is mainly a social organization, pathetically timid and human;
it is going to stand on the side of wealth and power; it is going to
espouse any cause which is sufficiently popular, with eagerness; it is,
on the other hand, often going to transgress its own fine ethical
statements and be deaf to its own Christ in unpopular and weak causes.
Du Bois, “Will the Church Remove the Color Line?” The Christian Century, 1931, cited in Phil Zuckerman, editor, Du Bois n Religion ( Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 200), 179.
Nevertheless, in Remembering Esperanza,
I tried to rework and renew discourse about Jesus for an alternative,
emancipatory remembrance and enacting of the way of Jesus, alongside
other religious adherents and other peoples of conscience from any
background. This has led me precariously close to being what Jeffrey
Stout has termed, following Van Harvey) an “alienated theologian,” one
who focuses on Christian traditions while setting aside significant
aspects of existing Christian belief. As I explain in the book, I find
it necessary to live that alienation as a way toward life. One cannot
undertake radical criticism of current culture and politics in the name
of Christian belief without taking up a scalpel for radical surgery on
Christian belief itself.
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PAUL TILLICH: THEOLOGIAN OF THE BOUNDARIES
Edited by Mark Lewis Taylor
Taylor’s well-constructed anthology, through itserudite selection of texts, provides solid introductionto the essential Paul Tillich."John R. Connally, Religious Studies Review
“ Taylor’s introduction to his Tillich reader is the onlyone of the introductions that attempts to be a creativeinterpretation of the thinker under scrutiny. Dawn De Vries, Theology Today
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Edward Said
wrote, as his own life drew to a close and as the U.S. assault on Iraq
in March 2003 seemed inevitable: “we need a Paul Tillich, someone to
take stock of our situation as an 'ultimate concern.' ”
When I was interviewing lyricist and singer, Michael Franti, of the musical group Spearhead, Franti at one point found himself struggling for some way to explain the “spiritual” aspect of his work.
“What do you mean by ‘spiritual,’” I asked. ‘
“I don’t know,
maybe…well,” Franti continued, “there was this guy who talked about the
spiritual as being whatever is our ultimate, ultimate….I forget the
exact phrase and the man, but…”
“Ultimate concern?” I wondered. “And do you mean Paul Tillich?”
“That’s it. That’s him. Great.”
That’s the
essence of Paul Tillich: developing concepts and perspectives helping
people, especially artists and those amid life trauma, to articulate a
view of the human situation that has spiritual depth. He was a
theologian, yes; indeed, a theologian who valued the Christian church.
But he approached and challenged the church as a “theologian of
culture,” i.e. as a thinker about religious matters who found the
religious or the spiritual, not on a plane above or outside of culture’s
many functions, but within them, within their depth. Not surprisingly,
Tillich’s “God,” his “Jesus Christ,” and his notion of “Spirit” departed
from what many Christians mean by those terms, and especially from what
the church teachers of orthodox doctrine mean by them. But when one
gets done reading Tillich, one suspects not only that he has given you
some wisdom for understanding what life’s about, but also that religious
symbols, especially Christian ones, offer something distinctively human
and needed for a creation and humanity that lives amid both misery and
hope.
Tillich (b.
1886 in Germany) served as philosopher and theologian in Germany until
1933, when he went underground and then fled to the United States to
accept an invitation from Christian ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr, to teach
at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. The recently
installed regime of Hitler first tried to bribe history with a lucrative
position, then increasingly repressed him. Tillich had not been wont to
keep his mouth shut. He defended his Jewish students from Brown Shirt
repression in 1933. He was the first non-Jewish intellectual to be
placed on a list of those to be purged. His 1932/1933 work, The Socialist Decision,
was immediately confiscated by the Nazis; his socialism was unique,
differing from other forms and harshly critical of the romanticist
fascism of the Nazis. That book, together with his earlier writings, I
believe are the richest of his work, rivaled by some of the fine essays
of his later period and some brilliant sections of his Systematic Theology.
I myself have found the basic structure of Tillich’s The Socialist Decision,
helpful for tracing the powerful currents at work in the political
processes and cultural psychology of current U.S. life. His work in this
book, therefore, structured the overall vision at work in my most
recent book, Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (see pages xii, xiv, 25-7, and 104-109.
His going into
exile from Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1933 was the outgrowth of
teaching, writing and organizing to which he had given himself after
World War I. That experience marked him forever, until his death at the
University of Chicago in 1965. “Hell rages around us. It’s
unimaginable.” Tillich, a 28-year old theologian and German Army
chaplain, rote those words to his father from the trenches of World War I
at the battle of Verdun. Even amid his grim despair and breakdowns
worked by the “sound of exploding shells, of weeping at open graves, of
the sighs of the sick, of the moaning of the dying”, Tillich remained
both preacher and professor – delivering sermons at the Western front of
battle and lectures in front of academics at the University of Halle.
Whether facing bombs of battle, political oppression and social chaos
after the war, the specter of nuclear warfare after World War II, the
threatening character of world capitalist economy, or the deep-running angst
in personal life – in the face of all these, Tillich sought sustenance
for his theology not only from the Christian scriptures and tradition,
but also from his culture’s art and the literature of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney and others.
Tillich’s
writing had power because in them he risked being in touch with what he
termed “the unrepeatable tensions of the present.” Our reading and
writing about him must likewise risk a view of him through an awareness
of the unrepeatable tensions of our own era.
But the very notion of “our
own era” is problematic. Who is this “our?” Given the intense plurality
of thought, religions, and cultures in our times, to invoke the first
person plural is often, at best, to risk misleading generalization. At
worst, it is to exclude others from our conversation and life. When I
write here in the plural, the “we” I have in mind are precisely those
who know the problems with such writing. There may be many who work
within communities that inspire little suspicion about the collective
“we.” But there are also many of us who see theology as entering an age
of increasing consciousness of theologians’ and all thinkers’ locations,
whether these locations be described in terms of gender, class,
ethnicity, or of some cultural amalgam of those factors. Pragmatic
philosophies on both sides of the Atlantic, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to
Richard Rorty, reinforce the sense of communal particularity that must
be remembered as part of all thinking. In these times when women and men
are wrestling with the implications for theology of a radically
self-locating consciousness, why read Paul Tillich, who for all his talk
of concreteness, loved also his ontology, his essence-language, his
universals, and a theolog6 of “culture.”
In these early
decades of the 21 st century, however, Tillich’s interest in combining
concrete issues with ontology may be emerging as a new stronger concern.
It is evident, for example, in French philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (English, 2005), as well as in the ruminations of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their books, Empire (2000) and Multitude
(2004). Feminists are exploring ontology, if not through Tillich, then
through retrievals of Spinoza’s mixing of politics with ontology. Others
with vibrant political concerns reach for tools to enable them to
wrestle with deep questions like “what is being as being” (ontology).
Indeed, Edward Said, if still with us, might be calling not just for
some summary account of our times’ “ultimate concern,” but also for some
ontological reflection.
When Tillich’s
works are studied in my classes, rarely do they receive ready
endorsement. Tillich’s writing engages the problems of human life, even
making specific references to the lives of Central American rural
Indians and North American college students, for example, but such
references are connected to a demanding philosophical analysis that
plunges readers into a world of technical terms. In addition, women,
Latino/a, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans and others,
as well as international students, bring to Tillich’s texts a set of
suspicions and issues that Tillich often does not directly address. But
rarely does Tillich fail to provoke and equip us in some way for
reflecting on, and acting in relation to, the distinctive problems we
discern, even if, finally, this may mean rendering negative judgments
about Tillich’s work.
In my Tillich
book, I have written its Introduction and a large number of briefer
introductory sections throughout. But the emphasis falls on letting
Tillich speak for himself. In selecting the texts you find in the book, I
had an over-riding concern to display both the conceptual unity of
Tillich’s work and also the way that work grew from a particular set of
historical and cultural concerns. Tillich, though addressing ultimate
and infinite concerns, thought and wrote from within quotidian and
finite conditions.
Tillich’s closing words in one of his last sermons, “The Right to Hope” (1965), are worth quoting here.
“Participation
in the eternal is not given to the separated individual. It is given to
him [sic] in unity with all others, with humankind, with everything
living, with everything that has being and is rooted in the divine
ground of being. All powers of creation are in us and we are in them. We
do not hope for us alone or for those alone who share our hope; we hope
also for those who had and have no hope, for those whose hopes for this
life remain unfulfilled, for those who are disappointed and
indifferent, for those who despair of life, and even for those who have
hurt or destroyed life.” (See page 331 in Mark Taylor, Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries.)
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BEYOND EXPLANATION:
RELIGIOUS DIMENSIONS IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
By Mark Lewis Taylor
"Taylor's . . .
central argument [that the discourse and impulses of cultural
anthropology have a religious dimension] are well made, and the
discussion of his two exemplars (Levi-Strauss and Marvin Harris) is
instructive, though social scientists remain agnostic as to its final
destination. Taylor generates novel insights linking the writings of
these anthropologists to the implicit order of presuppositions that
underlies them - a notable instance being the place of Rousseau's notion
of pitie in Levi-Strauss's vison." Jean Comaroff, The University of Chicago, American Anthropologist.
“One of the best
things about Taylor’s book is that in order to reach his conclusion, he
presents masterful, detailed summaries of Harris’s and Lévi-Strauss’s
work. . . . I suspect both men would acknowledge the integrity and
insight of Taylor’s account of their motivations and concepts." John P. Crossley, The Christian Century
“ Taylor
is equally at home in the literature of both disciplines; he
demonstrates methodological sophistication, unusual clarity of argument
and expression, and impressive constructive talents together with the
facility to carefully nuanced, well-balanced judgments. . . .His book
affords a model for evaluating religious dimensions in other social and
human sciences (Psychology, sociology, history, literary criticism,
linguistics, philosophy), and perhaps even the natural sciences. Nothing
could be more crucial for the survival of theology in the postmodern
world." Peter C. Hodgson, The Vanderbilt University Divinity School
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| Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology
(Mercer University Press, 1985) was my first book, a revision of my
dissertation for the Ph.D. degree in Theology, received from the
University of Chicago at the end of my years of doctoral studies
(1977-1982). Drawing on strands of Tillich’s thought and of
hermeneutical phenomenology (H.-G. Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur), I argued
that a “religious dimension” may be discerned in anthropologists’
discourse, so that this discourse may be viewed as driving “beyond
explanation,” i.e. beyond the disciplinary methods, descriptions, and
theories usually seen as constitutive of this social-science discipline.
The presence of
such a religious dimension I hoped would serve as a focal point around
which religionists and social scientists, theologians and
anthropologists, might converse. I hoped to move toward such a
conversation without co-opting anthropological concerns into fields of
religious studies and theology.
As the contrast
between reviewers judgments showed, expressed above by anthropologist
Comaroff’s reserve and theologian Hodgson’s praise, the book took better
with theologians than with anthropologists. Few anthropologists
responded to the book, though a similar article appeared later in Current Anthropology,
complete with nearly ten anthropologists writing in response, including
Marvin Harris himself, who was one of two major, representative
anthropologists in the book, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss. My response
to all of these anthropologists was printed in the same issue of Current Anthropology.
I still value
what I did in that book. It set the conversation that has marked all my
work – one that features the need to begin with descriptions of
theologians’ cultural situations before constructing and advancing
theological beliefs and claims. Of course, there is a persistent circle
between the hermeneutical interestedness of theologians in things
theological, on the one hand, and their descriptions of cultural
situations, on the other; but the circle is not vicious. One of the
things that keeps it from being vicious, is a refusal to take one’s
faith or theological beliefs as settled, to always be revising them in
spite of the discomfort in letting go of one’s received traditions
(personal, professional, cultural), of cherished doctrines, personal
orientations, or even of rigorously won disciplinary habits.
While the book’s
interdisciplinary concern has stayed with me, it must be noted that soon
after its publication, and really ever since, I have been more
interested in learning from anthropological and other theory to
interpret the world so that theologians might make a contribution to
changing it (to recall Marx’s famous last thesis on Feuerbach), and less
interested in continuing the book’s jousting with anthropologists about
their suspicions of religion, i.e. their claims to have distanced
themselves from all things religious when pursuing their intercultural
understanding and explanation.
Beyond Explanation,
for me, stands as testimony to my own doubts about any science’s
ability to reduce completely religious experience to other categories
(social, political, psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, and so on)
or any such science’s neglect of reflection on religious beliefs and
practices. Religious phenomena are too complex to reduce, too
influential to ignore. I would still labor to make those points, and
have in occasional published essays (see bibliographical entry, “Spirit
in the Researching of Cultural Worlds”). But I have found myself often
needing to develop anthropologists’ suspicions regarding theology and
religion. Many of those suspicions are good ones, challenging ones,
especially concerning the damaging and often ignorant refusal by
religious adherents regarding the cultural and other biases of their
beliefs and experience.
The way I do theology now (see especially The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America)
is informed, to a significant degree, by my sharing those
anthropological suspicions, especially the one that insists against any
theologians contrary claim, that theological beliefs are always
culturally mediated (thus saturated with controversial philosophical,
social, political, economic, often personal meanings).
Alas, when writing Beyond Explanation,
I myself did not sufficiently foreground the cultural mediation of all
knowledge. I certainly did so with respect to scientific knowledge, and
especially to the anthropological knowledge that I placed under the
book’s scrutiny. I did not, however, foreground the mediation of my own
venture in writing the book that would set anthropological and
theological interests in contrast and conversation. Why was I interested
in writing the book? Why was I predisposed to a conversation between
anthropology and theology? Why the concern that generated an entire
dissertation and book?
One could
answer, “Well the issues are significant.” Indeed they are, and I like
to think that a host of auxiliary issues and questions can be generated
from this book’s work. But deeper and perhaps more valuable insights
emerge when one notes and I am completely silent about this in the book
that my own personal/social location is shaped by my being son of a
cultural anthropologist father who was also a believing Christian. As I
detail in the autobiographical prologue in Remembering Esperanza,
the tension between my family’s anthropological side and its Christian
side was rendered especially acute by the family’s adherence to
evangelical intellectual heritages, piety and practices. I no longer
consider myself an evangelical, in belief or practice (though I am sure
those roots have left some telling signs and scars - for better and
worse).
As I relate the story and nature of this tension between anthropological and Christian interest in Remembering Esperanza,
I also argue in that later work that this kind of reflexive move on
one’s own thought, a “critical self-inventory” (Antonio Gramsci) is
necessary not only for self-knowledge but also for critical knowledge of
wider society and even of nature. In the philosophical jargon of Calvin
Schrag’s Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity,
hermeneutical self-implicature is integral to achieving any
intersubjectively verified, critical knowledge. So, it is interesting,
and important, to read Beyond Explanation (about anthropology and theology) through the lens of the later prologue in Remembering Esperanza (about the anthropological and theological sides of my life and work).
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